OnLive Says Batman: Arkham City Demo Breaks Records in U.S., UK

OnLive didn’t say just how many players actually took part in the demo (that would cause the company to reveal some kind of user numbers, which it continues to remain mum about), which consists of everything you can see from the beginning of Arkham City in 30 minutes or less — just that the demo broke records. The service allows users to stream games over the Internet to their PCs or Macs, or the company’s “micro console,” which plugs into an Internet connection and streams the games to a TV set instead. The benefit of OnLive is that it’s largely hardware agnostic, helping players still whining about the expense of a halfway decent PC gaming rig to use their crappy computers (and Macs) to stream PC games instead.

While we don’t really have, uh…any information at all of just how big a deal this demo was, OnLive’s CEO, Steve Perlman, touted it as being a victory for the service “try before you buy” mentality. That’s good, I guess. I suppose we’ll just continue to take OnLive at its word that the streaming service is doing really, really well, even though it refuses to tell us just how “well” well actually is.

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Much like steam, d2d, gamersgate, etc. None of them like to announce figures.

Valve of course has some statistics you can look at but hides the rest.

Amazon.com and sales of the kindles are same as this story. This kindle sold more than the last but how much did the last one sell? More than the one before that.

That’s how companies roll today.

ScrewTheConsole

On November 23, 2011 at 9:54 am

Played it on OnLive and bloody hell visually its worse then a PS3 and 360. It felt like downgrading big time and people pay £40 for that? They need a lot of improvements does OnLive starting to stream with 1080p and better frame rate streaming. My internet is 50mbs so nothing to do with my end…

G.A.R.B.A.G.E

On November 23, 2011 at 3:18 pm

Yeah streaming games Onlive is pretty bad visually. But it is nice to try or watch others play before I buy elsewhere. lol It that sense they are doing well enough for me.

@ User, that’s the way they all roll because its less about offering up numbers and figures as proof of anything and more about just using a generic press announcement for the free advertising of getting their name thrown out there.

user

On November 23, 2011 at 7:49 pm

@ garbage. Agreed on rolling.

I just played two games for over 10 hours in total on onlive and they look and played just fine – as in I’m just as happy as if I bought them via steam.

But then I don’t curse at my PC cause it can’t get 3fps more or because all options aren’t max and I must have a new video card now!!! I’m upgrading with the next gen nvidia kepler, btw.

50Mb is overkill. Onlive is single digits.

Onlive has different servers. Obviously, newer games are on better servers. Still, many people at once will drop the quality or they would have to have queues. Their servers are custom and very complicated.

But people find a way to complain whether its steam or onlive.

jon420

On November 25, 2011 at 2:03 pm

I just payed 1 dollar for this video game and I think will be trying Red Faction Armageddon and Homefront for free this weekend. I couldn’t sleep knowing that this technology exist after reading this then looking through a pc gamer magazine and seeing the on-live console for 99.99. What an ingenious concept to help a fellow gamer out. Happy-Holidays

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